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I upgraded from Linux Mint 10 Julia (Gnome) to Linux Mint 13 Maya (Cinnamon). It was a reinstall, however, I left my /home directory untouched. Now I am in the situation that I can't figure out what I have to search for, to solve this "black letter-on-black background" or "mouse-over" problem. For easier understanding I have attached two images. These are screen shots of Gimp and of LibreOffice. As you can see, an activation of explanatory text renders text of black letters over a black background.

It would be great if you could give some help in addressing this problem. The solution(tm) would be great, a link to it or some helpful keywords would be fine as well. Searching for something black finds a lot of black screens, mouse-over gives me a, currently, unwanted CSS-lesson.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.yo

<Edit:Summary of the solution. The root cause was that my configuration was a collection of ubuntu (several editions) and mint (several editions) settings. The way to solve it was to create a boogeyman user and to c&p its settings to the "normal" home directory. I opened the console in my home directory and copied the invisible folders to my home directory.

The only issue I had in the end was that my Desktop featured the /home directory files. I guess this was due to the fact that mint had German language settings and called the Desktop Arbeitsfläche. You can edit this quite simple by updating the user-dirs.dirs file in the /home directoryEdit/>

Attachments

LibreOffice

schwarz-auf-schwarz-02.jpg (7.43 KiB) Viewed 477 times

GIMP

schwarz-auf-schwarz-01.jpg (19.6 KiB) Viewed 477 times

Last edited by yothales on Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This leads me right to the next question. Is there a safe way to 'reset' my old /home directory without endangering functionality?During my back-and-forth switching between Ubunutu and Mint the Ubuntu structure always prevailed. As the device was working I never looked into it more deeply. In the light of the black letters on black background, some advice is highly welcome. Thanks a lot in advance.

as i see it you have 2 options (depending on the work you want to spend on it and the expertise you have)1- (more work, less expertise) swap all your personal data to the newly created user and forget the old account;2- (more expertise, less work) something like this viewtopic.php?f=110&t=121465&p=667840#p667840 (last post)

i don't recommend nowadays the use of a shared home across different distros: there's to many differences (unity, cinnamon, mate, gnome, xfce, kde >> just to name a few) and all have specific config settings, worst, incompatible in most cases.to make things even worst if you upgrade from an old gnome distro (like you from mint 10) there's no compatibility anywhere: gnome went through several releases and none is backwards compatible, mate nowadays is the closest but there's differences also (a nightmare )